LIVERMORE — The Livermore City Council unanimously threw its support behind a plan to convert the Livermore VA Medical Center to transitional housing for homeless veterans and a treatment center for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

After hearing pleas from veterans and their families to keep the 112-acre hospital campus open, council members on Monday approved a resolution calling on Congress to re-purpose the facility and provide funding to preserve it for future servicemen and women.

Livermore Mayor John Marchand, who wrote the resolution and shared it with federal officials at a recent White House forum on veteran homelessness, said the proposal presents a unique opportunity to house the region’s homeless veterans and draw attention to the plight of returning veterans, about a quarter of whom will likely experience issues related to PTSD.

“For someone who is struggling with (PTSD), you can put them onto 110 acres of (laurel oak) forest and lawns — you can’t really duplicate that in any other metropolitan area,” Marchand said. “It’s a healing environment away from the noise and crowding of the city, however, you’re within minutes of a major medical facility. It’s an ideal location.”

Situated on a hilltop with a panoramic view of the surrounding wine country, the Livermore VA hospital has served as a sanctuary for military veterans since 1925. The Department of Veterans Affairs announced plans to close the facility under a federal realignment plan in 2004, but a decade later, Congress has yet to appropriate funding for its successors — a planned outpatient clinic at Technology Court in Fremont and a 120-bed community living center at French Camp near Stockton.

Until the new facilities are built, the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System will continue to operate the Livermore hospital as it has since 1995, according to the system’s spokesman Michael Hill-Jackson, who declined to comment on the resolution.

“Our current plans for our Livermore campus still remain undetermined as we must wait until all services have been realigned to future clinics in Stockton and Fremont,” Hill-Jackson said. “All of this is contingent on the availability of funds, which are released each year by Congress and (the) VA for construction of new clinics and facilities.”

Concerned that French Camp would be too far and too stressful for local veterans, speakers who addressed the council Monday urged the council to ensure the hospital remains open and supported re-purposing the facility.

“It’s unfair to put our veterans (at French Camp),” said Bud Donaldson, an Air Force veteran and volunteer at the Livermore hospital’s Veterans Nursing Home. “If you ask them, they’ll tell you (Livermore) is the most peaceful facility they have in this area.”

Ray La Rochelle, president of the Vietnam Veterans of the Diablo Valley, called transitioning the hospital to a PTSD treatment center “an ideal re-purposing.”

“It’s unfortunate the VA has determined (the hospital) is not utilized enough, but it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” La Rochelle said. “We need to not only keep it open, but we need to bring it back to what it once was.”

Converting the Livermore campus would require Congressional approval. The idea has the support of Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Stockton, who said the council’s vote was a step toward keeping the hospital in the service of veterans.

“The VA has a responsibility to ensure that veterans are taken care of including a safe place to live and recover from the wounds of war,” McNerney said. “That goes for the Tri-Valley as well as for the San Joaquin Valley, where the VA needs to build the new facility at French Camp that they’ve been promising for years.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, said he recently asked the VA to allow the hospital to serve veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury, even after the Stockton and Fremont facilities open.

“The Livermore facility also has the infrastructure and land to serve and care for homeless veterans,” Swalwell said. “It would be a disservice to our local veterans to completely shutter the treasure that is the Livermore VA.”

Marchand, who shared an early version of the resolution in June with first lady Michelle Obama, VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and the White House’s director of intergovernmental affairs David Agnew, said the idea is generating interest in Washington.

“By passing this resolution and sending it we can put a greater focus on the needs (of) the veteran population,” Marchand said. “This is the first of many steps.”

More than 1 million veterans are expected to return to civilian society over the next five years and as many as 26 percent of them may experience some form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. (In 2013, nearly 58,000 veterans were homeless nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. There were 492 homeless veterans in Alameda County in 2013, making up 11.5 percent of all homeless people in the county, according to the nonprofit EveryOne Home.

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